Suggested rewrite: Led a cross-functional initiative that improved [business outcome] by [measurable result], demonstrating experience relevant to this role...
Senior Software Engineer, Canvas Core
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- Salary
- GBP 82,400–103k / yr
- Department
- Software Engineering
- Employment
- Full Time
- Experience
- Senior
- Published
- Apply before
- 12 Nov 2026
- Listing views
- 32
- Application actions
- 3
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The role, at a glance.
Mural is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and evolve the foundational Canvas Core platform behind its collaborative visual workspace. The role focuses on real-time shared-document systems, editor performance, rich object models, developer-facing APIs, and reliable canvas interactions. The engineer will own work from problem definition through release and iteration while partnering closely with Product, Design, and Engineering. Strong TypeScript/JavaScript expertise, distributed-systems judgment, performance optimization, and collaborative technical leadership are central to success.
Role DNA
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Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader UK market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would begin by defining the document model, operation types, consistency requirements, and conflict semantics. I would select an appropriate synchronization approach, such as OT or CRDTs, based on offline needs, ordering guarantees, and operational complexity; then I would design idempotent operations, versioning, retries, observability, and clear recovery behavior for failed or delayed events.
I would first capture reproducible traces and establish a performance budget for the interaction. I would profile rendering, event handling, layout, memory allocation, network activity, and main-thread blocking; then prioritize the largest bottleneck through techniques such as spatial indexing, viewport culling, memoization, batching, incremental computation, and moving suitable work off the main thread.
I clarify the user outcome, identify the smallest safe extension point, and make explicit which shortcuts create future cost. I aim for a well-bounded implementation with stable contracts, tests, telemetry, and documentation, while recording intentional follow-up work when a broader platform investment is not justified in the current iteration.
An effective internal API has a clear purpose, coherent abstractions, predictable behavior, strong validation and errors, versioning expectations, and documentation with practical examples. I also treat adoption feedback, observability, backward compatibility, and a low-friction local development experience as core parts of the API rather than afterthoughts.
I would turn uncertainty into a structured decision: gather constraints and stakeholder goals, propose a small number of viable approaches, identify risks and trade-offs, and align the group on success metrics. I would then lead an incremental implementation, communicate progress and decisions clearly, and use reviews, demos, and mentoring to help the team build shared ownership.
About this role.
ABOUT THE TEAM
The Canvas Core team builds and maintains the foundational platform that powers Mural’s visual thinking experience. This includes the infinite canvas, key editor components, document editing behaviors, asset management, real-time collaboration, and the systems that enable fast, reliable, and intuitive interaction on the canvas.
We’re also responsible for the Mural UI, the real-time message protocol that enables seamless remote collaboration, and the developer-friendly APIs that internal teams use to build features like diagramming, workshops, presentations, integrations, and AI-enabled product capabilities.
Our mission is to ensure the Mural editor is fast, reliable, intuitive, and easy to build on.
We prioritize performance, simplicity, developer experience, and platform quality, enabling teams across the company to ship quickly and safely on top of Canvas Core.
YOUR MISSION
As a Senior Software Engineer, you’ll help design, build, and improve the Canvas platform so that the Mural editor remains reliable, high-performing, and intuitive for our users.
You’ll work on the systems that power real-time collaboration, shared document editing, spatial interactions, rendering and interaction performance, asset management, developer APIs, and AI-enabled product capabilities across the Mural editor.
Your role will be to reduce platform complexity, improve the quality and speed of Canvas development, and help teams ship high-quality editor experiences quickly and safely. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and other stakeholders to turn ambiguous product and platform problems into clear, maintainable technical solutions.
Senior Engineers at Mural lead by example through strong technical execution, thoughtful design, high-quality implementation, and collaborative problem-solving. They help raise the bar for their team through design discussions, code reviews, mentoring, documentation, and pragmatic improvements to engineering practices.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
Own and deliver new Canvas platform capabilities and improvements from problem definition through implementation, release, measurement, and iteration
Partner with Product and Design to shape high-quality user experiences, balancing pragmatic technical delivery with long-term platform needs
Design and build maintainable Canvas platform systems, with accountability for quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience
Contribute to developer-friendly APIs, service boundaries, and platform contracts that internal teams can build on quickly and safely
Use AI-assisted tools and agentic workflows as part of your engineering practice to prototype, implement, test, document, and measure work effectively
Strengthen the team through technical design reviews, demos, code reviews, mentoring, and improvements to engineering practices
Build and evolve canvas systems with rich document and object models, including hierarchical scene or document structures, spatial indexing and querying, layout behavior, asset management, and selection mechanics
Work on large-scale concurrent and real-time collaboration systems that keep shared documents synchronized across users, contributing to design decisions around event ordering, latency, conflict handling, and failure-mode management
Help design, build, and integrate AI-enabled product capabilities where they intersect with the canvas, document model, real-time collaboration systems, or developer platform
Improve performance through profiling, bottleneck analysis, architectural simplification, targeted optimization, and moving expensive work out of critical interaction paths so systems remain responsive as document complexity and user activity scale
WHAT YOU’LL BRING
Fluency in modern JavaScript/TypeScript, with familiarity in React, Node.js, or comparable modern frameworks
6+ years building and shipping large-scale production software as part of an agile engineering team
Strong engineering judgment, with experience designing and delivering scalable, reliable, high-performance systems and developer-facing abstractions that balance simplicity, developer experience, and long-term maintainability
Experience designing clean API contracts and service boundaries, including thoughtful data models, versioning, validation, error handling, documentation, and long-term maintainability
Experience building distributed, concurrent, collaborative, or low-latency systems, such as collaboration tools, MMO games, shared-state systems, messaging protocols, or other low-latency user experiences, with familiarity across synchronization, consistency, event ordering, latency, failure modes, and performance trade-offs
Exposure to complex systems with rich object models, including hierarchical scene or document structures, spatial indexing and querying, layout behavior, asset management, selection mechanics, and performance-sensitive user interactions is a strong plus
Interest in AI-enabled product capabilities, or hands-on experience building or integrating them in production, such as intelligent editing, automation, recommendations, semantic document understanding, or collaboration features powered by AI
Performance optimization experience, including profiling, bottleneck analysis, memory and CPU efficiency, latency reduction, and responsiveness as document complexity and user activity scale
Familiarity with parallel processing, off-main-thread architectures, rendering pipelines, background computation, or other multithreaded systems is a plus
Practical experience using AI-assisted tools to prototype, implement, test, document, and measure engineering work
Communication and collaboration skills, with a low-ego approach to working with Product, Design, and Engineering, and the ability to contribute meaningfully to technical discussions, collaborate across teams, and help improve team engineering practices
Comfort operating in high-growth, fast-paced environments or scale-ups is a plus
Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
Equal Opportunity
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
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